


Speaking My Language

by enjolrolo



Category: Hawkeye (Comics), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man - All Media Types
Genre: American Sign Language, Canon-Typical Violence, Deaf Clint Barton, Fluff, Friendship, Gen, Injury
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-22
Updated: 2019-01-22
Packaged: 2019-10-14 11:15:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,095
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17507564
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/enjolrolo/pseuds/enjolrolo
Summary: Emboldened by exactly ten minutes of Googling how sign language works, Peter decides he's found the perfect way to get Clint to be friends with him. There's gotta be a real pal under all that grouchiness, right?





	Speaking My Language

HELLO, Peter signs, a little unsteady because he’s not sure if he’s supposed to angle his hand like this, oh shit--what if Clint doesn’t understand, Peter only knows like ten signs--

But Clint, excited, sets down his coffee so he can sign back, at a pace way too fast for Peter to comprehend.

“Uh,” Peter says. He narrows his eyes and tries to remember the sign for SLOW. Or AGAIN. Or anything that could possibly help him have one single conversation with Clint Barton.

Clint wrinkles his nose (maybe a smile??), seeing that Peter’s already lost. He signs HOW YOU? and tilts his head, and Peter feels a little more relieved. His frantic Googling of basic signs got him this far at least.

GOOD. Peter flails a little, then, in his best attempt at copying, HOW YOU?

TIRED, Clint says. He’s so much more animated than he normally is, even making the effort to make eye contact with Peter. Natasha had told Peter that Clint was a grumpy and impatient signer, but maybe Peter was getting somewhere? F-U-C(-K?) (SOME SIGN PETER HAS NEVER SEEN IN HIS LIFE).

Peter shrugs helplessly, and Clint snorts. Never mind, Natasha was right.

“Next time,” Clint mumbles, and picks up his coffee again, abandoning the interaction.

 

GOOD MORNING, Peter signs determinedly.

Clint’s eyes crinkle at the corners, an impressive feat considering the numerous band-aids covering his face. HI.

YOU NEED HELP-YOU?

NO.

Peter raises his eyebrows, and signs, clumsily, C-L-I-N-T (well, actually C-L-I-M-“Oh, shit”-N-T?), and tries to look disapproving. MJ calls it his Mom look.

Miraculously, it works, if only because Peter looks way too stupid to be untrustworthy. Clint seems to relent a little, and holds out an arm for Peter to take to support some of Clint’s weight. Peter had seen Clint take a pretty awful hit the day before, to his right leg, and he’d seen Clint limp off to the stairs after breakfast like a complete masochist. Clint must be in real pain for him to accept help.

Peter points across the lobby at the elevator, questioning, and Clint, with only one hand available, flips the bird in aforementioned direction.

“Fair enough,” Peter says, and they start up the sleek modern stairs of the new facility. He can respect making things more difficult than they have to be.

It takes them a while to get up the two flights Clint is satisfied with, but they make it. Peter tries to help Clint sit down on a couch and both of them end up falling onto it, Peter’s arm trapped underneath Clint and Clint hissing in pain.

They eventually get re-situated so that they’re comfortable, Clint on one end of the couch and Peter at the other, and Clint reaches for the remote and turns on the TV. A few minutes later, Clint signs an awkward, THANK YOU, and Peter beams.

 

Apparently, Clint’s started to be able to stand being around Peter (maybe he’s starting to trust him, but Peter doesn’t want to get too excited), and so they usually end up in the living room together, Clint lying on the couch and watching TV and Peter doing homework because he doesn’t focus in his room at home.

“It’s so quiet in here,” Tony comments, on a lap through the room.

YES, SAD, Clint signs, a fake pout on his face, and Peter covers his smile by looking back down at his homework. In truth, it’s nice sitting around with Clint, who keeps the volume down on the TV and doesn’t overwhelm Peter’s sensitive ears with small talk. Peter’s stopped noticing the silence of the room around him.

“What’d he say?” Tony asks, presumably directed at Peter.

Peter looks up, shrugs. Something about the request bothers the hell out of him. “Don’t you have like eight PHD’s? But no time to learn how to talk to your teammate, huh?”

Clint signs, OH S-H-I-T, spelling it out because he wants to make sure Peter knows what he’s signing (as if Peter hadn’t looked up how to swear in ASL _first thing_ ), and Tony looks like he doesn’t know quite what to say.

“He said hello to you too,” Peter says.

LIAR, Clint signs at the same time he says aloud, “Don’t sweat it, Tin Boy.”

“Okay,” Tony says, and then essentially flees the room without whatever he came for.

 

\--

 

“Come on a quick mission with me?” Clint asks Peter, catching Peter’s arm as Peter makes his way towards the elevators. Seeing Peter’s confusion, Clint sighs and says, “You don’t know the sign for ‘mission’ and I thought it would be easier to talk. I’ve already spent more time explaining this than--”

“Okay! Sorry,” Peter says. His brain is flipping through his calendar as quickly as he can, while also trying to tamp down the excitement of being asked to really hang out with Clint in _real life._ Peter will be the new coolest Avenger in no time. Depending on how long the mission goes, he might be a little bit late to movie night at Ned’s, but Ned and MJ will understand. They’re going to have to, because Peter’s going on this freaking mission no matter what.

Clint’s still waiting for an answer, and Peter doesn’t want to make him regret inviting him, so he blurts, “I’d love to come.”

Clint signs OK, as he says, “Should only take a few hours. In and out.”

Should be a chill bro sesh, if all goes according to plan.

 

Things go to shit very quickly.

Specifically, the kind of shit that culminates in Peter chasing Clint into a room in the hospital where Clint’s being prepped for emergency surgery. Peter can hardly see him through the rush of people that are all trying to keep Clint alive, but Clint’s eyes are locked on Peter. He’d been stuttering through his state of shock all the way to the hospital, trying to speak aloud to try and communicate, because his hands had been strapped down to keep him from rolling off of the stretcher. Even now that his hands are free, he’s not making much sense.

YOU OKAY, Peter signs, but he doesn’t know what else to do. He doesn’t think he’s being very reassuring.

Clint is probably terrified. His hearing aids have been fried, he’s still losing blood, there’s an unknown drug agent in his body, and a horde of people is rushing around him and manhandling him without permission--and the last thing that had happened on the field was Clint trying to take the brunt of a blast by leaping in front of Peter, despite the tranquilizer running through his blood.

(Peter hadn’t even seen the blast coming--he’d been sure they were out of harm’s way, he’d let his guard down because he thought everyone was safe, his spider-sense was being chill, it should be _Peter_ apologizing right now, he has no idea what Clint’s talking about.)

Peter had webbed his own broken arm to his own chest, and picked Clint up the ground, and Clint’s wild signing had likely communicated _hundreds_ of things that Peter hadn’t caught--the only thing Peter’s understood is Clint repeatedly returning to the frantic signing of HELP, over and over again, which is awful on its own.

He hadn’t been able to tell Clint that it was alright, because Peter’s only operational arm was holding Clint up, so he had just pressed on until someone had taken Clint from him. He’d fought off several people who had tried to pull Peter to a different room to give him medical attention, and now all he could do was watch.

Peter couldn’t even be sure what Clint was asking for--the doctors would be able to help Clint more than Peter would, in theory.

“We need to put him under, to slow the poison spread,” someone says to Peter, and pulls him up to his feet.

“I’m sorry, _poison_? He said--”

 The nurse keeps pushing him towards the exit. “I’m sorry, but we need to clear the room.”

“--he said it wasn’t poison, he just needs to work through it! Is he going to be okay--?”

Over the nurse’s shoulder, he sees Clint’s eyes widen even more, he sees someone put an IV into Clint’s arm, he sees Clint pushing free of someone’s hands to sign STOP and then Peter’s shoved out of the room, a door slammed in his face.

“Shit,” Peter says into the sudden quiet. He’s beginning to understand why Clint hates going to the doctor so much.

 

Clint comes off anesthesia in an uncharacteristically groggy manner. Peter suspects they’d given him a dose on the high end of the healthy range because of how much he was struggling, and that’s altogether _not very cool,_ but it means Peter and Natasha are front-row to Clint’s grumpy blinking and vague signing when he comes to.

Clint asks for water, accidentally hitting himself in the face with a bit more force than intended. “Fuck,” he hisses out loud, blinking in annoyance at his hand that had betrayed him. His voice sounds like he’s been eating thumb tacks for sport.

Peter holds the cup of water up for Clint to drink from, and after that agonizingly awkward experience is over with, Clint casts his hand around for the remote to his hospital bed and raises himself up into a sitting position.

HOW YOU? Natasha asks across the bed from Peter. She’d rushed to the hospital when Peter had called her on the verge of tears, not knowing what else to do for Clint. It had been a very stressful day for Peter, all things considered. Somebody had had to re-break his arm so that it would heal properly, which was an ordeal--sometimes his healing factor is a curse.

Clint raises one hand in a SO-SO gesture. His eyes a bit unfocused, he rolls his head a little to look at Peter. YOU?

Peter, in his exhausted state, only signs OK.

Clint gives a similarly lethargic thumbs-up, and then looks back to Natasha. I CAN LEAVE?

NOT NOW, Natasha tells him. Clint grunts, annoyed. The two of them start up on some much faster signing (well, Natasha is signing fluently and Clint is trying his best to stay awake and nods along as she goes) that Peter can’t quite catch. He sees some signs he vaguely recognizes, but he still has a long way to go.

He loves seeing Natasha like this, though--it’s the only time he really sees her emote (Natasha is known for many things, but expressing any human emotion is not one of them, typically). She eventually finishes her info session with Clint, and her gaze snaps to Peter, all humor and human compassion draining from her face as she switches to English. It’s terrifying, honestly. “You need to go get cleaned up,” she tells him.

Peter looks helplessly to Clint, not knowing what language to use in front of him when he doesn’t have his hearing aids. Seeing Clint already falling back asleep, however, he ventures, “Are you sure? I don’t mind sticking around? I mean, it’s a pretty chill hang here and I--”

“Peter, get out of here before I call your aunt.”

Peter winces at the reminder, and checks all of his pockets until he finds his phone. Predictably, it’s dead--he’d completely forgotten until now that he had a life outside being a super cool new Hawkeye sidekick. Ned and MJ are going to be _pissed,_  he's totally missed their rewatch of 'Mamma Mia! 2: Here We Go Again' at this point _._ “Oh, yeah, sorry--I gotta…”

“Thanks for helping this clown,” Natasha calls as he leaves.

Peter pauses by the door and turns to nod and wave goodbye. Natasha holds up a hand in a spectacularly unenthused farewell. “Yeah!” Peter says. “I, uh--totally, anytime.”

In the hospital bed, Clint blinks blearily and looks at him, and methodically signs, THANK YOU, and then his hands move from the front-of-the-forehead-sign for BOY and then to the creepy, more wiggly sign for SPIDER.

I BOY-SPIDER? Peter signs, forgetting how tired he was just a few seconds ago. A real sign name means that for _sure_ he and Clint are friends now--Ned is going to _flip_.

Clint’s mouth turns up in a smile, and he nods. Peter thinks his heart is going to explode.

“Go away,” Natasha reminds Peter, interrupting Peter’s moment of just grinning at Clint in a daze, and Peter turns and hurries from the room to find a subway home.

**Author's Note:**

> this fic is born out of spite because of all the asl fics on here that don't understand how asl actually works. this is by no means a primer on asl (bc i figure clint uses a seriously adapted version of it with his close friends) but really cmon yall i'm freaking losing it
> 
> hope u enjoyed tho


End file.
